Saying Goodbye to Expedition 8.5 and Hello to Unifier - Part 1

Primavera Expedition, now known as Primavera Contract Management (PCM), was a great tool in its day and still is as PCM. We had a number of clients who ran their entire capital program on the tool with hundreds of large and small projects.

Now that PCM is moving into the extended support phase, how do you get years of data out of the system and preserve it for future reference?

Alberta’s Capital Health was a big user of Expedition from the 1990s through to 2010. They had hundreds of projects that were sitting on a Sybase SQL-Anywhere server. Migrating them all to Unifier was not really worth the cost and effort but keeping the Expedition server going on such an old version was also costing IT resources. So the projects needed to be retired, and Alberta Health Services (AHS) needed to have easy access to the documents related to these health care projects.

Solution

Emerald’s PCM-Archiver came to the rescue. We had used our proprietary tool many times with many versions of PCM ranging from versions 11 to 14.2, but we had not run the PCM-Archiver with such an old version of Expedition before, so we were not completely sure what all the technical hurdles might have been. We knew the printing to pdf was going to need some attention. (See part 2 - A technical perspective)

The PCM-Archiver extracts all of the information about the projects and documents and saves it so that the old Expedition database can be retired altogether, saving IT thousands of dollars a year.

By selecting the projects and running the PCM-Archiver, we were able to automate hundreds of thousands of hours of manual effort that would have been required to archive these projects including:

1. Printing all of the Expedition documents to their default Forms in PDF format

2. Extracting all of the fields and saving them into Excel so that they can be searched in the future (new feature added)

3. Running all the project costing reports and saving them to PDF format (new feature added)

4. Extracting and saving all attachments on all documents

5. Full Project backup to a recoverable JAR file

Each project archive was automatically placed into its own directory for easy access to modules, documents and all backup materials if and when required. As part of the project, a validation checker was made to ensure that all the documents were captured and the PCM-Archiver had completed the massive projects successfully.

Timeframe

In just a few weeks of effort, we made our PCM-Archiver into an Expedition-Archiver, validated and pre-tested some sample projects, created new log and search features, and extracted 1,213,318 documents. The tool generated 1,123,318 Excel files,  39,384 links for attachments, and 91,236 PDF files (we extracted all the documents and generated the PDF documents for the documents that had a default form configured). Manually doing this work would have taken several people months with significant risk of human error.

If we were to regenerate all those documents again, it would require about 140 straight hours of computing work or 6 days, give or take. Between 70% to 80% of that time would be spent printing documents, while the remaining time would be spent doing everything else.